Michael Fisher: 'Misbehaving customers are your most valuable'

This article was taken from the April 2014 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content bysubscribing online.

On June 3, 2006, a video showing two men, clad in white lab coats and goggles, dropping 523 Mentos mints into 101 bottles of Diet Coke was uploaded to YouTube. This video quickly went viral, resulting in hundreds of millions of views by tens of millions of users. Perfetti Van Melle, the makers of Mentos mints, and Coca-Cola, the makers of Diet Coke, acted quickly by signing Fritz Grobe and Stephen Voltz, the individuals in the video, to production contracts.

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The first two video campaigns that were produced for Coca-Cola spiked sales of two-litre Diet Coke by more than five per cent each time. Mentos sales in the United States climbed nearly 20 per cent in 2006, their highest annual increase ever, and continued for three years. Coca-Cola was so enthusiastic about the experiment with its product that it ran the video Experiment 214, produced in October 2006, for more than three months on its home page and promoted a competition to encourage people to submit their own videos.

Companies are leveraging customer "misbehaviour" -- the use of a product or service in a manner in which it was not intended -- to produce better and more widely adopted products. Customer "misbehaviour" is not nefarious conduct, by definition. For example, money laundering by selling and purchasing fake items on eBay is not just misbehaving, it's a criminal act. Customer misbehaviour is trying to sell a real Ferrari 365 GT for $35,000 (£21,300) on eBay in 1998, which at the time was a site designed for selling collectibles such as Beanie Babies and PEZ dispensers for an average of $3.50. This is exactly what happened.

The usual reaction of most company executives would be to prevent or discourage such misbehaviour because of reputational or liability concerns. Indeed, there were lots of reasons why selling a real car on eBay in 1998 was not a good idea -- poorly designed search for automobiles, no delivery or shipping mechanisms to get the car to the buyer, and hefty fees based on selling price were just a few of the hurdles. However, Simon Rothman, then a young eBay executive, looked at this differently. Instead of worrying about those problems, Rothman not only allowed the sale but also began a campaign for adding to the site's functionality to improve the experience of selling an automobile. This ultimately resulted in an entire business unit, eBay Motors, that was responsible for billions of dollars in sales.

But eBay was not alone in leveraging users' misbehaviour. Chris Cox, VP of product at Facebook, relayed this story at the 2010 f8 Developer Conference: when Facebook launched its "friend" feature, students used the profile feature to "friend" each other. A few of the students began using the feature to "friend" fraternities and classes. The Facebook team noticed this and realised that it didn't make sense to "friend" a class so they built the "groups" feature.

This feature, in addition to being used for clubs, classes and teams, started to be used for parties.

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Parties, unlike fraternities, need start times and locations.

Facebook built "my parties" which eventually evolved into the "events" feature. Cox described the Facebook approach as "watching users misuse what we had given them and building the product that captured what they want to do." This approach to customer misbehaviour should be adopted by all companies. Ignoring how your customers are misusing your product means ignoring a creative, cheap and prolific source of product development. After all, the customer is always right.

Michael Fisher is the former vice president of engineering and architecture at PayPal. He is co-author of The Power of Customer Mis-behavior (Palgrave Macmillan)

This article was first published in the April 2014 issue of WIRED magazine